Efficient RRH Assignments for Mobile Network Operators in Shared Cellular Network Architecture

摘要

Radio Access Network (RAN) sharing that ensures efficient usage of network equipments among multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) and Cloud-RAN (C-RAN) benefiting installation, evolution, management and performance improvements are two major candidates towards the next generation mobile networks. In addition to them, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm provides many features including hardware abstraction, programmable networking and centralized policy control. One of the main benefits that can be used along with these features is dynamic virtualization of RAN in order to ensure network sharing among multiple MNOs and efficient usage of the RAN equipments such as remote radio heads (RRHs). In this work, we provide a use case study of SDN-based shared RAN infrastructures for channel-aware remote radio head (RRH) assignment to multiple MNOs benefiting from global view of the network in order to provide better received signal strength levels. We propose two assignment mechanisms and compare the performance of them with traditional RRH distribution. The Monte-Carlo simulation results reveal the proposed methods' performance advantages.